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Brigid Bergen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Brigid Bergen, WNYC and Gothamist reporter, filling in for Brian today and tomorrow, while he takes a couple days off. Every Thursday this month, we're celebrating the LGBTQ community with pride-related segments that we hope will be fresh and illuminating for the community, as well as straight and cisgender listeners. Last week, we talked about what it's actually like to be transgender with listeners and our gracious guests, Imara Jones and Tuck Woodstock. Today, we'll continue our Pride Month celebration with your calls on your favorite queer media.

Listeners, what are some of your favorite queer television shows and movies? We want to hear about your favorite pieces of media that are openly queer with explicit LGBTQ characters and plot lines, but also the TV shows and movies that maybe are a little bit more ambiguous. If your favorite piece of queer media isn't overtly queer, why do you consider it to be? Are there any characters that you love to see as queer but aren't straightforwardly written as members of the LGBTQ community?

What are some of your favorite movies and TV shows that are culturally significant to the LGBTQ community as a whole? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Joining us now to talk about the history of queer representation in media is Rowan Ellis. She's the author of Here and Queer: A Queer Girl's Guide to Life. She's a speaker and LGBTQI+ advocate who creates content around history, pop culture, and activism. Rowan, welcome to WNYC.

Rowan Ellis: Thank you so much for having me. Hello.

Brigid Bergen: Hello. While we're mostly talking about television and movies today, I think the backlash against queer media is really visible in what kinds of books are banned from schools. According to PEN America, 23% of all book bans in the United States target LGBTQ characters or storylines. Why do you think it's important to have LGBTQ representation in media for all age groups?

Rowan Ellis: The thing is it's reality. It's just the reality of the world around you, and I feel like within educational institutions having a reflection of reality, whether that be current human beings who exist or what's been going on in our history, all of these things are part of a well-rounded education to me. I think that it's vitally important just from an education point of view, but also from the point of view of young queer kids and those who have queer people in their family who want to see themselves and those they love represented, as well as those who maybe have not necessarily had any queer people in their lives, but who still deserve to understand the world around them and the people around them.

I think it does a great disservice to all young people to try and keep that information from them.

Brigid Bergen: Explicit representation of the LGBTQ community hasn't always been present in movies and television. In your YouTube video, The Evolution Of Queerbaiting, you discuss the history of representation in Hollywood. Can you talk a little bit about the earliest queer moments in Hollywood movies and why queer storylines seemingly disappeared from our screens for much of the 20th century?

Rowan Ellis: This is actually a super interesting bit of history. We see at the beginning of Hollywood not necessarily having a lot of deep explicit explorations of queerness, but definitely, moments that had queerness within them. We had same-sex kisses. We had people dressing as different genders, which at the time, was particularly radical. There were literal laws against what was referred to as cross-dressing, for example, but that was something that was part of entertainment. Oftentimes it was within comedies, but there were some quite tender moments as well.

As we got into the 1930s, that changed. There was a landmark court case in the States in 1915, I believe which essentially ensured that a judge officially made the decision that movies fell under the power of the American government's potential censorship. Not protected under the First Amendment, because there was the potential for them to be used for evil was the logic there.

Within that decade or two afterwards, it was actually the CEOs themselves that turned around and looked at that and said, "This could be really tricky for us if the government decides that they are going to clamp down and censor what we can do." They created essentially a guideline code that they enforced within their own movies known as The Hays Code. That was a code that included a bunch of different things from drugs to sexuality, to violence, all of the stuff that they thought might come under the purview of censorship by the government.

One of the particular ones that was effective in terms of queer representation was a clause, the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin, and queerness of all kinds was essentially covered under that. You would either not have any queer characters at all, or if you had any characters that were hinted that way, whether through what's called queer coding, so taking the symbolic queerness, whether that was having particularly a feminine male characters or particularly masculine female characters and hinting so that if you were looking for it, you would understand what those suggestions were trying to say about the character and ensure that their storylines ended in misery, in punishment, in criminality.

Although they were mostly absent, you also had these incomplete, miserable lives that would also be part of queer coded characters at the time, so it's not to essentially be seen to endorse the lifestyle of these characters.

Brigid Bergen: Our phones are starting to light up, and I want to bring in Colleen from Manhattan. Colleen, welcome to The Brian Lehrer Show.

Colleen: Thanks for having me.

Brigid Bergen: What do you have to suggest? Go ahead.

Colleen: Oh, I was just going to say Heartstopper and Young Royals on Netflix are two of my all-time favorite shows, and I'm probably someone who would consider myself straight, but as a kid, I don't think I've ever seen gay representation in TV shows I watched, and now I am seeing characters, especially Heartstopper with lesbian, gay, transgender romances that really helps me empathize and relate to my friends and people around me, and I think it's awesome.

Brigid Bergen: Colleen, thank you so much for calling. Let's get another caller in here, Pete in Reinbeck. Pete, welcome to WNYC.

Pete: Hey, how are you? I was just calling because I wanted to put in a plug for one of my favorite shows. Really my current favorite show, Somebody Somewhere just finished up season two on HBO, and some old friends Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen put that together, but it's-- I wouldn't necessarily call it a queer show, but it has some very prominent queer characters.

Joel, who plays the best friend, and and Murray Hill plays Fred Rococo who's transgender, and it was just great to see it because it takes place in Kansas, but it has these characters you wouldn't necessarily see in a show that takes place in middle America like that. Great show, I highly recommend it.

Brigid Bergen: Pete, thanks so much for the suggestion. Rowan, what do you make of our initial list of recommendations so far? Is there any themes that you're hearing in that?

Rowan Ellis: Yes, I think that the representation that we currently have on screen is way beyond what I had as a kid, same as the first caller. I can't really remember, maybe one or two characters that I was able to watch when I got into my teen years. Definitely nothing as a child. I think that that is something that's really exciting within this new wave of representation is these shows like Heartstopper that specifically are catering to teenagers, but in a very soft, what's often referred to as clean teen way, so it's not your Euphoria or your Skins, it's something that you could watch if you were 12 coming into teenhood.

It's not something that's looking towards more young adult 18-plus audiences. That I think it's very, very important to have for young people both who are potentially struggling with their sexuality or who just want to see a nice lovely show about a group of friends and maybe see people reflected in that friendship group that reflect their own friendship groups at school.

Brigid Bergen: You have a few videos about characters that you think should have been queer. One group of characters you discuss is Disney villains. Why are so many Disney villains queer icons?

Rowan Ellis: This is interesting to me. The video series that I did was originally intended to be a tongue-in-cheek joke, but the more you dive into it, the more you are like, "Oh, there's actually some interesting history here." I'd be remiss not to talk about it as well as just having a bit of a joke around. Queer Disney villains are very, very tied in with The Hays Code actually. If you think about the idea of a time in Hollywood where you are only able to present within villainous characters, this also makes complete sense if we're going to talk about a version of heroics and heroes and protagonists, especially male characters who are often at the forefront of these movies being a stereotype of what a man is "supposed to be." Very masculine, very much with that saving the day, sweeping in with the sword or the gun, protecting his lady, all of this kind of stuff that goes with this idea of the white able-bodied heterosexual hero that we so often see in everything from comedies to romance to action and adventure movies.

If you're going to create a villain who is the opposite of that, who is playing against that type, who is trying to be someone that audiences, and especially if we get into audiences of children, can see the very obvious differences in, then what you end up with is a character who ties very closely into queer coding. The idea of someone who doesn't fit into the gender binary necessarily, who doesn't seem to have a great interest in women, who has these elements that are-- it's tricky because we're not essentially saying this is what people are like, but we're saying this is how they were coded and represented at that time.

I think what essentially happens is you have this archetype of the villain that writers, then for years, end up replicating not because they're trying to create queer-coded villains, but because that is what a villain looks like for decades in Hollywood or at least a certain subsection of villain. We see it in the very effeminate stylings of Scar in The Lion King or Ratcliffe in Pocahontas who is obsessed with gold and glittering jewels and has this tiny dog that he carries everywhere with him in his very prim.

Well, actually, the contrast to that is the lead character, this man who is an adventurer, who is very masculine, is swinging off waterfalls and doing all this stuff. It makes sense that that is where you would go with it from a storytelling point of view, but I think the issue is that there was no actual queer representation run alongside that. That was all that the community had were these characters.

I guess the options are either you add other queer characters within that particular genre or you make those characters explicitly queer and just lean into the villain aspect of it because they have become favorites of a lot of queer people like Ursula for example, obviously from The Little Mermaid, iconically based on the drag queen Divine. There is also a lot of queer background going on that's also more explicit. I think that those also have a place in the hearts of a lot of people who grew up with these villains being people that they related to in a strange way without necessarily knowing why as queer kids growing up and exploring themselves and trying to figure out who they are.

Brigid Bergen: Rowan, we've talked a little bit about queer coding, but can you describe more explicitly what queerbaiting is and how do you spot it and why does queer representation sometimes take this form?

Rowan Ellis: Queerbaiting is another really interesting one because I think that it is a symptom of a very particular time within television. With queerbaiting, the idea would be that you would have-- typically, it was a TV show where particular characters, sometimes a few different characters within a TV show would seem, as you were watching, to have some charged connection between them to have something that was a little bit more than friendship or to be characters who seemed to have queerness within them, and that a lot of the viewers would pick up on this.

A lot of the fans of the shows would pick up on this, but when asked about it outside of the show, the writers, the actors would either deny it and say, "No, that's crazy for you even thinking that," or more likely ambiguously answer the question, "Oh, you'll have to wait and see. Oh, see what happens next. Oh, we don't want to give anything away." The idea being that these producers of these shows were able to keep queer audiences who were hoping for some representation while also not alienating more conservative audiences who might have switched off if they'd have known for sure that a character that they were watching was queer.

In that way, they could keep both audiences hanging. Interestingly, within that, the video I did that was a comprehensive history of this phenomenon realized that we'd moved onto another version of this that I called queer catching. Which essentially is almost the reverse of that where you'll have a big deal made out of the idea of a queer character within the press or PR for a new show or movie. There'll be interviews saying, "We have Disney's first gay character," or, "Oh, there's a really exciting scene we're looking forward to our queer fans watching." Then that doesn't end up in the eventual material in the show or in the movie, so almost the opposite.

Queerbaiting is that there is something that seems to be there, but it's denied or left ambiguous when the writers or producers or actors that are talking about it outside of the show and then queer catching is the idea of it being talked about a lot publicly, but not actually following through in the piece of media itself.

Brigid Bergen: So interesting. Let's go back to the phones. Gregory in Harlem, welcome to WNYC.

Gregory: Well, hi there. I can't believe that's the perfect segue to what I was going to speak about was a television show called Dark Angel, which was an interspecies kind of thing where the characters were interbred or somehow biologically made with other species or something. Dark Angel, the characters always led me to believe that in some kind of way, two or three of the characters were always either bi, or lesbian, or something like that. It's just a feeling that I had about how the characters were acted and reacted to each other.

Brigid Bergen: Gregory, thank you so much for your call. A couple other suggestions that we've gotten of media with queer representation from a texter include Schitt's Creek and Queer as Folk. Some other items. Let's go to James in San Bruno, California. James, thanks for listening, thanks for calling The Brian Lehrer Show.

James: Yes, thanks for taking the call. In the history of Hollywood movies and the portrayal of queer characters, I was thinking of a very famous Humphrey Bogart movie, The Maltese Falcon. We've all seen The Maltese Falcon and the story, and, of course, Bogie being Bogie and playing the Sam Spade character, but in that character, remember there was this other guy played by Peter Lorre, the actor Peter Lorre, a guy character named Joel who had his hair permed, he spoke in a very little character type of a voice, he walked around with-- and he was, I think in the 1940s, the closest they could actually portray a gay or homosexual character without expressly stating that it was.

For years, I watched that movie and it didn't hit me that that's what he was. He's almost a comic relief during the movie. The Sam Spade character, remember, slaps him around and grabs his gun away from him and does all these emasculating things to the Peter Lorre character, and why that was written into the story, I don't know, but when you think about it, that was about as close in the 1940s as Hollywood would come to saying, "This character is a homosexual." That was one commentary I wanted to make. That's all.

Brigid Bergen: James, thanks for your call. Rowan, two interesting callers there. Any reaction to any of their suggestions?

Rowan Ellis: Yes. Oh, my gosh, The Maltese Falcon is such a classic example. I'm so, so glad that someone brought that up because, your are close, it's exactly what I was talking about, this idea of utilizing the complete opposition of what is meant to be the ideal man and the idea that a male character is embodying these elements of women, but these elements of women that are it's very tied into sexism as well, the idea of hysteria that he has to be slapped to calm down or it's not that he's having a fight with this other man. There is a taking down, which is also almost humiliating.

I think all of that's such an interesting observation and is very, very much an example that gets talked about within queer academia around movies, for sure.

Brigid Bergen: I have another text that came in. It's a little bit longer, so I'm going to read it to you, Rowan. "One unexpectedly queer show is Bob's Burgers. There are a bunch of supporting characters who are gay like Nat without sexuality being the focus of the storyline. They include transgender characters from the first season without judgment like the fan-favorite Marshmallow who will be finally voiced by a trans woman in Season 14. Fans for years have noted that Bob is definitely a bisexual person. It all just is. The storyline isn't about being gay, it's just about life and the characters that happened to be LGBTQIA." Rowan, can you talk about that idea, the idea of what LGBTQ representation in media can look like and whether it's interesting or it's just like life?

Rowan Ellis: I really like that example. Bob's bisexuality is such an interestingly handled topic. If anyone is familiar with their Thanksgiving episode, where he has a not affair with the deli counter man, it is truly a masterful comedy scene that is about sexuality, but not laughing at sexuality. I think that in terms of the type of representation that we want is essentially-- Within the UK, there's an organization called the LGBT History Month organization who has this theory of the best ways of educating around queerness in schools, and it is just further into actualization and usualization.

Usualization is-- I guess, it's some people might call it normalization, but I think it was trying to be without the implications of the word normal, but the idea being that you would include queerness within just like normal lessons. For example, in ways that I think a lot of people would not necessarily have thought of the idea of heterosexuality being included in math class. That's the thing that you would just think, "Well, that doesn't happen." If you look at a textbook, and they've got an example with an illustration of a mom and a dad doing a birthday party for their daughter, and they've got 30 kids coming, and they need to figure out how many cupcakes to make.

That is what's called heteronormativity, the idea that there is no other option for these kinds of examples other than there being a mom and a dad. Usualization will be to say, "Hey, what if we were more expensive than this?" In the UK, in the '90s, there was a big push for this within the way that characters were, their cultural backgrounds were. Rather than just saying, Tom and Mary, it's like, well, "Let's use names that are more reflective of the diverse communities who are within the UK."

You could very easily have it be two dads who are following the birthday party, and nothing would really change and it's just not remarked upon, it's just part of the math, and that's it. Actualization is also saying, "As well as that, we do actually need to talk about this stuff more specifically." There are particular pieces of history that have evolved our community. There are certain experiences that we will have, that are also important to talk about in a very specific way and to get engaged with directly.

I feel like for representation, that's also similar. That we allow, in the breadth of queer representation that we might have, characters who just happen to be queer, and that's not really remarked upon, and it's just part of the background of the show and of their character, and they date or have relationships or have worries and troubles the same as anyone else, but that it's also important to be having stories in which the specificities of queerness, the complexities of it, the conversations that happen in the community are also reflected. I think that there's only so far that we can do the kumbaya, I don't see color, everyone's the same to me, we're all equal before we start saying, "Oh, actually things are more complicated than that," and doesn't have to be a problem. That can be an opportunity for really exciting storytelling as well.

Brigid Bergin: Rowan, I want to read another text that came in. This is from Fred in Bushwick. Fred wrote, "Did anyone mention The Golden Girls? I watched it when it originally aired in the '80s, when I was in high school, and I was obsessed. I'm still obsessed and so many straight and LGBTQ folks simply love it." I want to segue into the question of why might someone feel like a character should be part of the LGBTQ community or feel like a piece of media is significant to the LGBTQ community, even if the character isn't queer coded, or the piece isn't explicitly queer.

Rowan Ellis: I think that there are experiences that are if not universal, for queer people, definitely have a strong connection with the community. I think that the obvious one that a lot of people will think of is coming out, the idea of like a coming out scene, a coming out moment, a coming out storyline, and that emotion of coming out, the ideas behind it, the stripped back sensation of, "I have figured out something about myself, and I'm letting other people know, and maybe I'm nervous about their reaction, and maybe I don't know how they're going to react to it," is a situation which is not unique to queer people.

A very classic example of storylines or genres which might feel queer even though there was no queerness in them would be something like the superhero genre. Because if you think about a lot of superhero characters, they are concealing a secondary identity. There is a truth about them that they discover, and they don't know who they can trust with that secret. That there are people who are in the case of the X-Men storylines and comics, for example, who were fundamentally against these types of people, people who think they might be dangerous, people who think they have to be legislated about.

There are a bunch of different kinds of-- and that's just coming out is just one example of experiences that queer people have that can feel very relatable. I think especially because we are, at least those of us who are a bit older, have the sense of not having seen actual queerness on screen for so long that we are used to trying to find things that we relate to in these other types of more metaphorical storylines.

I think that there's definitely, as well as that you also have stuff where the community rallies around because of the support for the community that straight actors or writers or directors have expressed previously. There is a lot of loyalty there to people who have respected the community and have acted as allies as well.

I know that for example, Natasha Lyonne is an actor who inexplicably is straight, but has had such iconic queer roles that a lot of queer people will follow, to whatever show or TV show project that she's involved in and have that support because they felt that support from her through her work in But I'm a Cheerleader, for example, or Orange Is the New Black where she plays like very iconic at this point, probably historically significant queer roles.

Brigid Bergin: We're running out of time. I want to get in one more caller. Then I have one more question for you, Rowan. Wendy from Springfield, New Jersey, we have just about 15 seconds, and so if you can give us what you want to suggest is the queer media that you think we should mention today.

Wendy: Omar in The Wire. That was the first three-dimensional black gay character I saw. He had a love interest, he had a mission in life, he had a moral code. He was wonderful.

Brigid Bergin: Wendy, thank you so much for that call. Thank you for making that suggestion. Rowan, before we let you go, I want to get your answer to the question we put out there for listeners. What are some of your own favorite queer movies and TV shows? Is there a character that listeners would be surprised to hear you describe as your favorite queer icon?

Rowan Ellis: I would say that one of my favorite pieces of queer media that I feel is appropriate for almost all ages is a British movie called Pride. It is fantastic. It's essentially based on a true story that you almost certainly have never heard of, of a group of queer activists who decided to raise money for striking miners in the '80s in the UK to show their support for them against the government that had also been persecuting queer people during that time. It is a beautiful story of found family and friendship and very classic British clash of cultures type of movie.

It is absolutely delightful. It will make you laugh out loud. It has some absolute national treasures in it and also will show you a little bit of history that you might not otherwise have been exposed to. I think that like a movie or TV show character who I think people would maybe be surprised by-- I could name a bunch that are characters that have been pounced upon by the queer community from when they were kids where they felt like a strange affinity with the character and couldn't really tell you why. Things like Spinelli in Recess is a classic example.

I know a lot of queer girls who were like, "Why do I feel such a connection to Spinelli?" Which is such a specific character in a specific show, but when I talk to queer women, especially, so many of them name this character, and hadn't talked to anyone about it. It's been this independent thought that they'd had that so many of us have gone through because it was someone who didn't necessarily fit into what a girl was supposed to be.

There's also characters that are technically canonically queer. There is queerness there, and it's just not necessarily talked about in that way. The obvious example, for me, being something like Mulan, the Disney movie. You have a character who is dressing as different genders who finds a lot of power in that ambiguity of gender and a love interest who seems to have a great deal of affection and romantic feeling for a character before knowing that she was, in fact, a woman.

I think that that is something that's slipped under the radar maybe for a lot of people when they're younger, but I do know a lot of queer people who, even when they were watching it as kids had this feeling of "Oh, wait, what is that? What's happening here? Is this something that's allowed?" and felt a lot of comfort in it.

Brigid Bergin: Well, thank you, Rowan Ellis, for that list. We're going to have to leave it there. My guest has been Rowan Ellis. She's a speaker and LGBTQI+ advocate who creates content around queer history, pop culture, and activism. She's the author of Here and Queer: A Queer Girl's Guide to Life. Rowan, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Rowan Ellis: Thank you so much for having me.

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